Source: In the Shadow of Tomorrow (1936), Ch. 2.
“Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”
A 51, B 75
Source: Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)
Context: Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their unison can knowledge arise.
Source: Problems and theories of philosophy, 1949, p. 154, as cited in Łukasiewicz, 2016.
Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Modern Science and Pantheism, p.60-1
Additional Letters From The Federal Farmer, 53 (1788); although generally attributed to Lee, his authorship of these letters is disputed in "The Authorship of the Letters from the Federal Farmer" by Gordon S. Wood, in The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 31, No. 2 (April 1974) http://www.jstor.org/stable/1920914
“The ideals that are the starting point for every revolution”
2016, Remarks to the People of Cuba (March 2016)
Context: The ideals that are the starting point for every revolution -- America’s revolution, Cuba’s revolution, the liberation movements around the world -- those ideals find their truest expression, I believe, in democracy. Not because American democracy is perfect, but precisely because we’re not. And we -- like every country -- need the space that democracy gives us to change. It gives individuals the capacity to be catalysts to think in new ways, and to reimagine how our society should be, and to make them better.
“This conception and ideal of society is certainly not new.”
Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal (1896)
Context: A society to which preestablished forms, crystallized by law, are repugnant; which looks for harmony in an ever-changing and fugitive equilibrium between a multitude of varied forces and influences of every kind, following their own course, — these forces promoting themselves the energies which are favorable to their march toward progress, toward the liberty of developing in broad daylight and counter-balancing one another.
This conception and ideal of society is certainly not new. On the contrary, when we analyze the history of popular institutions — the clan, the village community, the guild and even the urban commune of the Middle Ages in their first stages, — we find the same popular tendency to constitute a society according to this idea...
“Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought.”
Source: A Death in the Desert (1864), Line 59.
Source: Dramatic Lyrics
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), The Wellspring of Reality
The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic Pt. I Human Nature (1640) Ch. 9
Source: Leviathan
